The New Robber Barons Are Democrats

Much of the financial support for the sort of “immigration reform” favored by Barack Obama has come from Silicon Valley. The immigration bill that passed the Senate but stalled in the House would not only grant legal status to millions of illegal immigrants but also greatly increase legal immigration. Of central importance to Silicon Valley, the bill would expand the H1B visa program that allows tech companies to import cheaper foreign workers to drive down the salaries of computer programmers, engineers, and the like. Although it is the House Republican majority that has so far stopped the passage of the disastrous immigration bill, many Republican politicians have expressed support for much of Silicon Valley’s agenda, including an expansion of the H1B visa program.

A new report on political giving in Silicon Valley should make even the dimmest member of the Stupid Party wonder why anyone in the GOP is willing to carry water for Silicon Valley. Crowdpac, which analyzes political giving, examined the political donations made by employees of Silicon Valley tech firms and venture capital firms, as well as of Stanford and Berkeley. The results are stunning. 100% of the political donations made by employees of Twitter went to Democrats. So did 90% of the political donations made by employees of Google and Apple and 85% of the political donations made by employees of Yahoo, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Facebook. A whopping 97% of political donations made by employees of Berkeley went to Democrats, as did 91% of Stanford donations.

It is no surprise that the rich have great political influence, as Silicon Valley certainly does. What is surprising is that many Republican politicians wish to advance the interests of a class that increasingly despises them. Maybe, just maybe, Republicans would be better off ignoring the new robber barons and giving heed instead to the people who actually vote for them.

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John SeilerHuntington Beach10/22/2014 03:47 PM

These techhead billionaires were brainwashed in the top universities. So they're Left-Democrats. They also swarm around one another in Silicon Valley and SF. By contrast, billionaires in older industries still come from more traditional, Republican backgrounds and associate with similar titans. Of course, a lot of them also favor open borders and other parts of the Left Agenda. Just look at the Bushes.

Bryan FoxHouston10/22/2014 06:53 PM

If the H1B visas were to be suspended these freshmen billionaires might put their money where their mouths are, and reform the education system to where it produced quality technocrats. But I’m just wishing. As for Republicans doing the right thing for the nation on curtailing legal immigration isn’t likely. Either they have financial interest or are politically correct panderers for a few votes from a constituency that loathes them. I can hear neo-cons like Bill Bennett degrading us and our forebears mumbling we all come from immigrants. The Irish pioneers, settlers of 1835 San Patricio Texas are denigrated to the level of a Calcutta Indian 180 years later. Speaking of panderers, the Bushes come from old Connecticut money and have never hid their contempt for the Texas Republic and the old South. They will never live in our ruined neighborhoods with millions of Mexicans and Central Americans they pay lip service to.

Nicholas MOSESParis (FR)10/25/2014 01:12 PM

I am often asked, as a software engineer, why I do not wish to go work at a prestigious Silicon Valley firm. There are so many reasons I don't know where to start, but I suppose above all there's the fact that in general living and working in the United States has become an unbearable burden for a twenty-something like myself: the toxic P.C. company culture, the total absence of paid vacations in the best years of one's life, the social compensation in the form of $50 weeknight dinners where even one's young male peers from the South use "like" every twenty words at least. There is of course the competition factor: despite the higher nominal starting salaries, in the States, in France I am not subject (for the moment) to intense competition from the Third World and therefore long term I am in a much better negotiating position for any contract. There is however a more general problem in the I.T. field, albeit one which touches the Silicon Valley in a particularly loathsome way that Mr. Piatak describes above: extreme cerebral myopia, which of course naturally accompanies the hyperspecialization inherent to and the hyper-concentrative capabilities necessary for success in the field. But as John Seiler hints, the myopia of the liberal-social democratic types around the Bay reflects a strange ignorance (endemic to a lot of Macbook-loaded frequent flying yipsters ["yuppie hipsters] of the Lena Dunham generation) of the common thread with the Old Money Republican robber barons like the Koch brothers, without whose oil their precious iPhones and 747s would simply not exist. It is easy, I suppose, living in glitzy isolated urban complexes, to forget how wild the world is, to forget as Fred Reed put it that food doesn't actually come from Safeway. But it doesn't change the fact that IT professionals more interested in the cute memes they can make with machines than in machine functionality will be toast along with their Apple collections at the next Carrington Event.